Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Thirty years ago, the painter Lisa Yuskavage received what most people would consider to be the worst review of her life. Her husband couldn\u2019t figure out why she was so delighted.In Artforum, the critic Lane Relyea described Yuskavage\u2019s paintings of perky-breasted, button-nosed women as \u201cHello Sex Kitties\u201d and \u201cvisual stink bombs\u201d. As soon as she read the brutal pan of her first Los Angeles solo show, \u201cI knew I had arrived,\u201d Yuskavage tells me over cinnamon-dusted coffee in her giant studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. \u201cThe bat had connected to the ball in a big way.\u201d She jokes that the review belonged in a folder with all the other venomous, but not inaccurate, responses to her work. She\u2019d like to label it: \u201cYou Say That Like It\u2019s a Bad Thing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Yuskavage \u2014 now aged 62 \u2014 has been courting disapproval for decades with her deeply saturated, often discomfiting portraits of nude white women. When she started out, figurative painting was out of fashion. Today, it is contemporary art\u2019s most popular genre \u2014 and Yuskavage is on top of the art world. Her largest paintings cost more than $2mn. She\u2019s represented by the mega-gallery David Zwirner, which opens a solo exhibition of her work at its Los Angeles flagship this month to coincide with Frieze LA. In June, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York will present the first comprehensive survey of her drawings.\u00a0Amid today\u2019s glut of safe figurative painting, Yuskavage\u2019s distinctive, round-bellied and buxom women still manage to make plenty of people uncomfortable. \u201cShe defies the archetype of the good feminist, which I think is key,\u201d says the 33-year-old New York-based artist Emily Coan. \u201cA lot of artists in my little pocket of the art world think of her as the queen. She shifted the paradigm for the next generation of figurative female painters.\u201dLisa Yuskavage shifted the paradigm for the next generation of figurative female paintersReferences to some of Yuskavage\u2019s classic \u201cvisual stink bombs\u201d appear, like Easter eggs, in her latest exhibition in LA \u2014 her first solo presentation in the city in almost three decades. For an artist who is well aware that some people still know her only as \u201cthe one who paints the big boobs\u201d, it\u2019s an opportunity to reintroduce herself. She\u2019ll have you know that, in the intervening years, she has built up an oeuvre that is expansive and complex enough to serve as her primary source of inspiration. The woman who once notoriously mined the men\u2019s magazine Penthouse for subject matter is now mining her own lore. Call it the Yuskavage Cinematic Universe.\u00a0Her latest paintings zoom out to capture an art-historical subject almost as traditional and weighty as the female nude: the artist\u2019s studio. Yuskavage fills the spaces with callbacks to older works, recurring motifs, surreal touches and, in a new development, images of the artist at work. In one painting, Yuskavage\u2019s likeness wears a paint-splattered lab coat and stands in front of a towering painting of a woman whose breasts are taller than her torso. \u201cI liked how I could play with scale,\u201d she says. \u201cI thought it was funny.\u201dIf painting a pubescent female nude with vacant eyes and unnerving orifices was her first taboo, Yuskavage is thrilled by her latest: capturing a middle-aged woman at the peak of her creative powers. These works suggest an artist who is comfortable in her mastery. \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re an old witch now, and you\u2019re off at the edge of town doing your thing,\u201d she says. \u201cThe [earlier] artwork is a stand-in for my earlier, more developing self, and by inserting this worker bee person, it represents a different self.\u201dYuskavage grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Philadelphia; her father was a delivery truck driver and pie salesman and her mother a homemaker. She is an outlier in an art world where many come from generational wealth. When she arrived at the Yale School of Art in 1984, Yuskavage remembers feeling \u201cso ashamed of my working-class sensibilities that I put them all away in deep storage\u201d. It was only once she allowed those repressed thoughts \u2014 the shame, internalised misogyny, powerlessness, trashiness and kitsch \u2014 out to play that she found her voice as an artist.\u00a0After her father died in 2021, Yuskavage started video calling her mother while she worked; it\u2019s part of the reason she began to think about putting herself in the frame. More often, however, she paints alone. Her only assistant focuses on administrative duties, like updating Yuskavage\u2019s website, where each work is exhaustively catalogued and cross-referenced \u2014 yet another Marvel-style rabbit hole. The encyclopedic website is a testament to how seriously she has taken her evolution as an artist, even when others didn\u2019t. \u201cI built very strong muscles to swim hard against the noes,\u201d she says.In her horribly reviewed 1994 show, Yuskavage painted a pubescent nude staring blankly out at the viewer proffering a teacup. It was meant to unnerve and implicate, but it was dismissed by some as flat, cynical provocation. A similar figure reappears in \u201cTea and Cigarettes\u201d (2024) \u2014 but now, the woman inhabits a distinctive, less cartoonish body. She is freed from the confines of the canvas and stands in the middle of a painting studio, staring at the teacup as if someone had just placed it in her hand. She is not serving the viewer; she has been served.\u00a0It turns out the model in \u201cTea and Cigarettes\u201d is based on an unpublished photograph of Kate Moss that Yuskavage took for a portfolio in W magazine in 2003. Moss\u2019s likeness stands in front of a work from Yuskavage\u2019s 1994 show, \u201cBig Blonde Squatting\u201d, propped on an easel. Both the painting and the painting-within-a-painting are done in what the art historian Marcia Hall describes as the \u201cblond manner\u201d, a technique associated with the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance where the purest colour is captured in shadow and the rest is built up with white paint, creating an otherworldly luminosity. When Yuskavage first decided to show in LA in the 1990s, she latched on to the idea of a visual pun: painting California blondes in the blond manner.\u201cAll the parts get sticky and come together,\u201d Yuskavage says of her self-referential new chapter. \u201cI know so much now, and I have so much material.\u201d\u00a0After visiting Yuskavage, I reached out to Lane Relyea, now an associate professor at Northwestern, who wrote the pan in Artforum. \u201cMy writing back then was overheated in general,\u201d he admits, but maintains that the works \u201cwere intended to provoke, and in that way I can see why Lisa liked my response\u201d. Over the past 30 years, he has seen Yuskavage\u2019s work evolve from what he considered \u201caggressive\u201d images of underaged nude bodies to \u201cspatially and psychologically strange\u201d and \u201ctechnically stunning\u201d interiors. \u201cLisa deserves all the acclaim she\u2019s received,\u201d he concludes.\u00a0February 18-April 12, davidzwirner.com; June 27-February 4, themorgan.orgFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Thirty years ago, the painter Lisa Yuskavage received what most people would consider to be the worst review of her life. Her husband couldn\u2019t figure out why she was so delighted.In Artforum, the critic Lane Relyea described Yuskavage\u2019s paintings of perky-breasted, button-nosed women as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":207241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-207240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207242,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207240\/revisions\/207242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}